


One-Thousand Cranes

by FriendlyNeighborhoodFangirls



Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, But also, But also nothing, Coping, Fluff, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hope, Hopeful Ending, Hurt Stephen Strange, I'm not that's for sure, Introspection, Loneliness, Origami, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Somehow, Sorry for any emotions, Stephen Strange Needs a Hug, The Author Regrets Everything, Tony is Dead and Nobody's Dealing with it Well, Why is it always so much angst, Wishes, maybe? - Freeform, paper cranes, seriously, so much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-19 02:45:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19347931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FriendlyNeighborhoodFangirls/pseuds/FriendlyNeighborhoodFangirls
Summary: After it all, a man with shaking hands makes a wish.





	One-Thousand Cranes

**Author's Note:**

> LOOK! It's... it's something... SHORT!
> 
> Anyway, woot woot, here's some emotions, hope you enjoy!

One crane, and Stephen is confused.

He makes it out of a large sheet of paper, ripped into a square, in an attempt to keep the folds even. But his shaking hands and his inexperienced technique still create something awkward and ugly and bulbous.

He doesn’t know why he made it. He doesn’t have time for origami, and he isn’t very good. Obviously.

But he can get better. If he does it enough, he can get better.

He keeps the awkward crane on one of the polished shelves in his bedchamber.

* * *

Three cranes, and Stephen is embarrassed.

This one is just as imprecise as the first two. Stephen lets it drop from his shaking fingers with a sigh, the flutter of its connection with the ground too loud in the silent Sanctum.

When he taps on one wing, the crane teeters to look at him. Its beak is slanted leftward due to the crinkle of the backward fold within. Stephen hadn’t left enough space when he’d brought the corners together.

He knows why he made this one. The stupid fairy tale he heard as a child, standing in a coffee shop and seeing dozens of baskets of little paper birds lined up along the wall, rings in his mind.

 _‘Fold one-thousand cranes,’_ the man at the front desk had said, _‘and your wish comes true.’_

They were wishing for world peace in that tiny local coffee shop, and Stephen shakes his head, frowning at the little bird in his hand.

Just a stupid fairy tale.

He keeps it with the first two anyway.

* * *

Four cranes, and Stephen is sighing.

He has too many wishes.

* * *

Nine cranes, and Stephen is proud.

This one took almost an hour to create, with each fold shakilly and perfectly positioned. When Stephen sits back, hands cramping from the effort, the crane is clean and recognizable. It almost looks like origami, this time.

Allowing himself a smile, Stephen pricks his finger with the pointed tail of the paper figure. He stands, and the wooden legs of his chair screech on the hardwood of the library. The crane flutters in his hands.

Stephen leaves it on the end of his line of little birds, sharp where they are curved and clean where they are soft.

* * *

Sixteen cranes, and Stephen is late.

He should have been at Kamar-Taj fifteen minutes ago, but he couldn’t leave this figure incomplete. He’s stepping through his portal as he makes the final fold, inverting one of the tails to become a beak, and he tucks the crane into his pocket.

“Sorry,” he says to the novices. He doesn’t make an excuse, and they don’t ask for one.

Someone deals him an impressive blow to his side halfway through training, and he blinks up from the cobblestones somewhat hazily.

“Oh,” gasps the novice. Her eyes are wide, and her fingers drum on the staff in her hand.

“Don’t worry.” Stephen stands and conjures his mandalas again. “I’m fine.”

_I’m fine._

When he reaches into his pocket that night, the crane is crumpled like a tin can, its wings bent inward and its tail almost ripped off.

Stephen salvages what he can and leaves it on the shelf, propped up against the fifteenth.

* * *

Twenty-seven cranes, and Stephen is tired.

He can’t sleep. He’s been trying, but the memories shred through when his conscious mind is at rest, when he isn’t actively keeping them at bay. So many memories, so many stories, so many words he will never say and so many mistakes he will never make. So many deaths. So many promises.

He sits on the edge of his bed, his shoulders slumping and his hair itching in his watering eyes. On his knees, he folds the cranes, not caring that they crumple, not caring that they look broken. He can’t even hide the brokenness in himself.

The cranes are moon-white.

* * *

Fifty-two cranes, and Wong realizes.

He doesn’t ever speak to Stephen about it. But Stephen knows his friend has noticed when he finds the pad of pre-cut squares lying on Stephen’s favorite nook in the Kamar-Taj library. The papers are beautiful and delicate, patterned with feathers and flowers and looping knots, and they smell of pulp and glue.

The folding goes faster when he doesn’t have to tear squares.

* * *

Eighty-nine cranes, and Stephen is apologizing.

He and Peter were talking, arguing the merits of a theory, and Stephen was preoccupied. He’d made the crane out of a piece of Peter’s homework before he’d realized.

Peter’s laughing, though Stephen apologizes again for good measure.

“I didn’t know you folded, Doctor Strange,” says the boy.

Stephen shrugs, moving to unfold the crane and return the paper to its rightful owner. “I haven’t, not until recently.”

Peter lays a hand on his. “Don’t,” he says. “It’s alright, you can keep it. I’ll just print another one.”

Stephen often forgets that some things are replaceable.

Some things aren’t.

He can see calculus equations spidering across the crane’s wings. Diagrams of 3D rotational figures are folded into its tetrahedral body, and an indefinite integral loops around its beak. Stephen taps the tip of it’s wing, and it wobbles.

“It’s pretty,” Peter observes. “I heard a story once where a girl folded a thousand of them and they granted a wish.”

Stephen swallows, the crane fluttering in his hands. “Yes,” he breathes. “I heard that too.”

* * *

One-hundred and five cranes, and Stephen is hungry.

He’s waiting for his order at the deli, and he’s antsy. He hasn’t eaten out in a long while, and definitely not to Delmar’s; usually it’s just him and the Cloak and some expired yogurt. But Wong stopped by, and Stephen still has enough semblance of pride to offer to get something edible.

Wong said he could pay. And Stephen had just stood there and stared at him, reminded in such an innocent, mind-numbing way that so much had changed.

He folds the crane out of a recycled napkin. It’s limp, it’s neck hanging sideways because the paper is too thin to support the weight of the head. It’s wings drag on Stephen’s palm.

“Order for Stephen?”

* * *

One-hundred and seventy-three cranes, and Stephen is alone.

It’s been two months, to the day. Stephen doesn’t realize until he’s halfway through folding the little bird, but that is why he can’t eat, can’t see, can’t breathe. Wong only comes in once, bringing tea and a few moments of companionship, but Stephen can’t remember how to speak.

A novice knocks once or twice. Stephen doesn’t emerge.

He sits at the window and folds, watching Greenwich village bustle beneath him. The people are recovering, all of them shaken though only half were revived. There are rather more around than usual, and Stephen wonders vaguely if their celebrating. No one looks up.

He isn’t sure when the tears start, but the crane on the windowsill is wet with them as he sets it down, little puckered circles on the paper. His vision is blurring. The crane is nothing but a haze of red and gold against the overcast sky, and Stephen drops his head into his hands and sobs.

* * *

Two-hundred cranes, and Stephen is running.

The rain pours in freezing curtains, not quite cold enough in the winter air to crystalize. Stephen holds his jacket over his head, the Cloak wrapped high around his ears, and tries to peer through the cascade to see the ground beneath him. The wind whips the rain nearly horizontal.

This is stupid, he knows. But the gust had been so sudden, pulling the crane from his hand and whipping it into the rain. It can’t have gotten far, not weighed down by the water, so Stephen kneels close to the soaked cobblestones and searches.

The little bird is floating in a depression in the road like a lone autumn leaf. Stephen scoops it up. Freezing water drips between his shaking fingers.

The crane looks limp and dead on the shelf beside all the others, even when it dries.

* * *

Two-hundred and sixty cranes, and Stephen is folding out of candy wrappers.

* * *

Three-hundred and four cranes, and Stephen is drawing the process out.

He’s at a memorial. Everyone is, it feels like. The air is heavy with grief and guilt and regret but Stephen is nothing but cold. Empty.

He doesn’t want to be here. It’s a terrible thing to think, a terrible thing to even consider, but Stephen just wants to go home. He won’t until tomorrow, though. It’s the holiday and someone remembered that he shouldn’t spend it alone.

There’s only one sheet of paper in the little booklet they gave out. Stephen doesn’t look at it. He just folds, and it’s the most beautiful crane he’s ever created, because he pours every ounce of his attention into it. Every fold consumes his awareness.

He can’t listen this way. He can’t hear.

He can’t feel.

* * *

Three-hundred and five cranes, and Stephen is folding with someone else.

“What are you doing?” little Morgan asks, looking up from her place beside the tree. She’s playing with the plastic screwdriver Rhodey gave her.

“Folding,” Stephen replies. He has his knees pulled to his chest on the couch, taking up as little space as possible, and is playing with paper against a clipboard on his thighs.

“What are you folding?” Morgan gets up and makes her way over to him.

“A bird.” It’s patterned with snowflakes from the wrapping paper.

Morgan’s eyes widen as she watches his movements. “It’s pretty.”

Stephen smiles, stretching his legs over the edge of the sofa. Morgan climbs up next to him, leaning against his shoulder, and he tries not to stiffen in surprise. “Thank you,” he says.

“Can you teach me?” she asks.

_One-thousand cranes for a wish._

“Of course.”

* * *

Five-hundred and forty-six cranes, and they don’t fit on his shelves anymore.

* * *

Six-hundred and five cranes, and Stephen is angry.

He’s staring holes through the paper figure on the Sanctum table, his eyes aflame with denial, with hate.

_The universe just works that way._

_Timelines unfold._

_It was his choice._

_Your fault._

_No other way._

Fuck that. Fuck the multiverse, fuck the timelines, fuck the rules and the choices and the impossibilities. Stephen doesn’t care about any of it.

He just wants to see him again.

With a roar, Stephen grips the crane between his hands and twists. The wings crumple against his fisted fingers.

But the neck is too layered, too thick with folded paper to pull apart. Even as he twists the crane’s head and body again and again and again and _yanks,_ only papercuts dot his palms.

This crane looks like a corkscrew next to the others, stained with blood and misshapen with fury.

* * *

Eight-hundred and thirty cranes, and Stephen accidentally leaves a portal open too long.

The imps are chaotic and mess-making, and they tear through a good number of his collection before he can contain them.

Stephen’s back to seven-hundred birds.

* * *

Seven-hundred and eighty-four cranes, and Stephen has to buy more paper.

* * *

Eight-hundred and ninety cranes, and Stephen writes on one of their wings.

He goes to sleep that night hoping that in the morning, he’ll be fresh. That in the morning, he’ll be able to breathe, to see, to eat. That in the morning, he wouldn’t love anymore.

Just like that.

* * *

 

Nine-hundred cranes, and Stephen watches them pour from his shelves and drawers and bed posts, rivers of misplaced hope.

He spends the day stringing them into long garlands of winking paper birds. There are so many, of so many colors, of so many sizes and emotions. They drape through the room much the same as they did before, and Stephen lifts a trembling hand to trail down them as he leaves to return to his duties.

Folding has left calluses on the pads of his fingers.

* * *

Nine-hundred and ninety cranes, and Stephen wants to stop folding.

It’s a stupid fairy tale.

* * *

Nine-hundred and ninety-eight cranes, and Stephen is trembling.

_One-thousand paper cranes for world peace._

Stephen doesn’t wish for peace. He wishes for the _‘successful privatization’_ of it. He wonders if that’s the same thing.

* * *

Nine-hundred and ninety-nine cranes, and Stephen breathes.

He’s been folding for so long. Counting toward a nebulous goal that wouldn’t ever really get here, couldn’t ever get here, because then Stephen would have to face it, would have to kill it, and he wasn’t ready for that. He wasn’t ready for anything.

The crane is brown and silver, patterned like rolling hills on a distant horizon. Stephen pricks his finger on the point of its tail and looks toward the very first crane he ever made. He can still pick it out in the forest draped through his Sanctum quarters.

So much fluttering hope.

* * *

One-thousand cranes, and Stephen makes a wish.

 

 


End file.
